PORSCHE CARRERA CUP GB
Prior to this season, all of Dan Cammish’s title victories had followed a familiar pattern. In British Formula Ford in
2013 and his two previous Porsche Carrera Cup GB triumphs, he had won at the opening weekend and never looked back.
Cammish did indeed win the first race of this campaign, too, but the run of dominant victories did not follow for the Redline racer. Quite simply, the competition – chiefly Lorcan Hanafin – did not allow him to do that.
Hanafin headed into this season a little under the radar. The JTR driver had shown flashes of speed in his rookie campaign last year but was unable to take a win, while Harry King stole the headlines as he blitzed the opposition. Many therefore expected a thrilling fight between Cammish and King this year but, in reality, Hanafin was arguably the fastest of them all.
He showed that by qualifying on pole for the opener at Snetterton by four tenths of a second and would have claimed his maiden win had he not crept out of position at the start. Nonetheless, the improvement was plain to see. “The extra work I was putting in behind the scenes was paying off,” says Hanafin. “With iZone, I was doing sim training between my online [school] lessons – I was jumping on the sim for an hour doing head-tohead racing or qualifying runs.”
Hanafin’s first win did indeed come at Brands Hatch, with further triumphs following at Oulton Park and Knockhill, but early-season race-two woes – a slow puncture, track-limits penalty and contact – hampered his charge, while striking a tyre stack at Croft also proved costly.
All the while, Cammish continued to rack up the podiums – even when he admitted he was not at his best and was battling with a lack of straightline speed. And that consistency made the difference: 12 top-threes from 16 races allowed him to beat Hanafin by seven points in the final reckoning. It may have been a very different path to title glory but it still allowed Cammish to make history, becoming the category’s first three-time champion.